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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com - Call Of The Wild by Jack London
Thornton shook his head. ‘No, it is splendid, and it is terrible, too.
Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid.’ ‘I’m not hankering
to be the man that lays hands on you while he’s around,’ Pete
announced conclusively, nodding his head toward Buck.

‘By Jingo!’ was Hans’ contribution. ‘Not mineself either.’ It was at
Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete’s apprehensions were
realised. ‘Black’ Burton, a man evil-tempered and malicious, had
been picking a quarrel with a tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton
stepped good-naturedly between.

Buck, as was his custom, was lying in a corner, head on paws,
watching his master’s every action. Burton struck out, without
warning, straight from the shoulder.

Thornton was sent spinning, and saved himself from falling only
by clutching the rail of the bar.

Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor yelp,
but a something which is best described as a roar, and they saw
Buck’s body rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton’s throat.
The man saved his life by instinctively throwing out his arm, but
was hurled backward to the floor with Buck on top of him. Buck
loosed his teeth from the flesh of the arm and drove in again for the
throat. This time the man succeeded only in partly blocking, and
his throat was torn open. Then the crowd was upon Buck, and he
was driven off; but while a surgeon checked the bleeding, he
prowled up and down, growling furiously, attempting to rush in,
and being forced back by an array of hostile clubs. A ‘miners’
meeting’, called on the spot, decided that the dog had sufficient
provocation, and Buck was discharged. But his reputation was
made, and from that day his name spread through every camp in
Alaska.

Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton’s life in
quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long and
narrow poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty-Mile
Creek. Hans and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing with a thin
Manila rope from tree to tree, while Thornton remained in the boat,
helping the descent by means of a pole, and shouting directions to
the shore. Buck, on the bank worried and anxious, kept abreast of
the boat, his eyes never off his master.

At a particularly bad spot where a ledge of barely submerged rocks
jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and while Thornton
poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank with the end
in his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the ledge. This it
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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com - Call Of The Wild by Jack London



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